Jeffrey Lurie was basking, which was expected and, given the outcome of the NFC championship game, entirely appropriate. He was in the middle of the Eagles locker room Sunday, a semicircle of reporters around him, his team’s 31-7 victory over the 49ers still so fresh that the maintenance crews hadn’t yet disassembled the stage where Lurie had, for the third time, held up the George Halas Trophy for everyone at Lincoln Financial Field to see.
Lurie doesn’t make himself available for public comment and questions as often as he once did, when he was a newer, younger NFL owner, eager to establish his bona fides among his peers and among Philadelphia football fans. But a third Super Bowl berth for the Eagles under his stewardship, their second in five years — oh, he could make time to talk about that. And it wasn’t just that they’d advanced to the big game again. It was that they had done it with a different coach and quarterback than they had the last time. Doug Pederson and Carson Wentz/Nick Foles then, Nick Sirianni and Jalen Hurts now, just a half-decade apart.
It is a noteworthy achievement, to have a franchise go through so much change after winning a championship and position itself to win another in such a short time. And by firing Chip Kelly in late 2015 and Pederson in early 2021, Lurie himself had created that change, that upheaval. Those were thorny times — the power plays, the battles for control, the ash piles that remained, the rebuilding to be done. Yet in each situation, the team had reached the Super Bowl two years after Lurie decided that a man he had selected to coach the Eagles could no longer coach the Eagles.
